Undercurrents (23 page)

When I got to the door, I stood back and cased the job. The door to the right of the desk was supposed to lead to the room where Kit was being held. The door to the left of the desk, according to the physician, led to a smaller room from which patients in the room next door, head cases, could be observed.

Both doors were steel, with massive, keyed locks set below their knobs. Each was hinged to open out to the hall, so the door couldn’t be removed from its hinges from inside. Apparently Tressen head cases could get feisty.

I tried the knob on the door behind which I was supposed to find Kit. Unlike the outside door, this one didn’t budge. I eyed the exposed door hinges. Unhinging a door to open it was noisy. So was a door bore. And both had the undesirable side effect that thereafter the door couldn’t be closed if plans changed. And the one certainty in a planned operation was that plans changed.

As the mental clock ticked down in my head, I shrugged off my ruck, opened it on the vacant guard desk, and retrieved my lockpick set. Then I knelt in front of the door handle and reset the snoops for close work. I also cursed myself for dozing through Lockpicking and Safecracking 101.

That wasn’t the real name of the class. The spooks euphemistically named it Defense Against Methods of Entry. Trueborn case officers would never, ever break in to somebody else’s locked property, of course. We just needed to know how bad people might try to do it to us. Same thing for Defense Against Sound Equipment. I also had loaded a regular bughouse of listening devices into my ruck.

I glanced left and right. This corridor remained deserted. The distant murmur of distracted nurses and doctors in the dark soothed my nerves.

Still, as I slid the first slim pick into the keyhole and wiggled it, my fingers trembled.

Then something clunked in the distance, and I jumped.

Overhead, the corridor lights flickered.

I whispered, “Crap.”

Forty-nine

“It was just a circuit breaker.” In suddenly restored light, the interrogator turned and smiled, blinking, at Polian. The two of them were wedged into a cramped room, barely an elongate closet, walled with vertical pipes and insulated conduits.

The man lifted his hand off of a copper knife switch bolted to the side of a gray steel box on the wall of the tiny room. Polian released the heavy top-hinged access panel that he had held open while the interrogator had worked. “Done?”

The interrogator wiped his hands on his trousers. “I think so.”

Polian backed until he touched the door that led from the utility closet to the corridor, then turned and looked down the bright-lit, white corridor toward the interview room. He blinked.

The interrogator backed out and stood by Polian. “What’s wrong?”

Polian shook his head as he peered down the corridor at the vacant guard’s desk. “Nothing. But the guard hasn’t returned.” Then he jerked a thumb back toward the T-junction of the corridors while he stared. “He must have gone to cover the main-entrance door when the power quit. Go back down there and fetch him, will you?”

The interrogator nodded, then walked away, his footsteps echoing on the floor tiles while Polian kept staring. Elsewhere, he heard the voices and footfalls of hospital staff as normalcy returned.

Then Polian walked slowly down the corridor toward the interview room where he had left the woman shocked senseless, bound, and gagged. Though the little recent excitement had passed without incident, he breathed faster now. It was as though an undercurrent was pulling him forward.

Fifty

Heart pounding, I pulled the heavy door shut behind me and heard it lock. Then I stepped into a suddenly bright, classroom-sized room, windowless on three white walls. A blacked-out window ten feet wide, with its lower sill waist high, was set in the fourth wall’s center. In the room’s far corner was a cot. Closer to me stood a table and two chairs. A man’s jacket hung half-off one chair back, like someone had left in a hurry.

I tugged off my now-unnecessary snoops to widen my field of vision and saw a console on the table. Cables ran from the console to the floor, then crossed the floor to a metal-frame chair.

My heart skipped. In the chair sat a person, back to me, wearing a loose gray smock and trousers. Blonde, female, head bent forward, she slumped, motionless.

I sucked in a breath as I stepped toward her.

Her arms were taped tight to the chair’s legs, her arms to the chair arms. Copper wires were taped to her palms and the soles of her bare feet, and were wrapped around the chair frame.

“Oh, God. Oh, God,” I whispered as I came around in front of her, knelt, and looked into her face. “Kit!”

Her eyes were closed, and her tongue protruded, bloody and swollen, from her mouth.

I shook my head. “No! Oh, no!”

She breathed, barely. I peered at her. It wasn’t her tongue, it was some sort of bloody rag.

At least I had paid attention in first aid, even during Legion Basic.

Step one. Clear the airway. I slipped trembling fingers into her mouth and freed the bloody rag. I felt around her tongue. Not swallowed. Airway clear.

She breathed deeper.

Step two. Stop the bleeding. I searched her torso and limbs but found no bleeding. Good. But if she was puking blood, she was bleeding internally. I couldn’t put a tourniquet on that. All I could do was watch her die. “Goddamit! In the middle of a fucking hospital!” I tore off my rucksack and flung it on the floor.

Her eyes opened. She looked up at me and blinked.

My eyes burned as my throat swelled.

Her eyes widened, blue, enormous, and bloodshot. “Parker?”

She shook her head and asked again through lips dark with dried blood, “Parker? If it’s you, am I dead?”

I took her face between my palms and held it until I got her to look into my eyes. “Kit. Look at me. Listen to me. Do you know where you’re bleeding?”

“What?”

“Ribs? Gut-shot? Chest cavity?” I drew back, looking down at her torso. No bloodstains.

She looked sideways, at the bloody rag in my hand. “That’s not my blood, Parker. You should see the other guy.”

I turned my face up and closed my eyes. “Thank you!” Then I leaned forward and kissed her cheek, stranger’s blood and all.

“Cut me loose, Parker.”

I retrieved the rucksack, tugged out my knife, and sawed at the tape that bound her legs with the knife’s serrated edge. “What the hell is all this?”

“Yavis.”

“That I know.”

“Electric-shock interrogation.”

“Bad?”

“Do I look like it was good?”

I cut the last tape off her arms and smiled at her. “Better now?”

She threw her suddenly freed arms around me and hugged me. I slid my arms around her, too, gently, and nearly recoiled. Beneath the smock she felt tiny, wasted. Then she began to shake and sob.

She whispered, “God, I missed you.”

I felt wetness on my ear, then the touch of her lips.

Alia had been right. The princess had kissed me.

I held her and cried, too.

After a few seconds, she drew back from me and wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand.

I stared at her hair, which was frizzed out like a scouring pad, then pointed. “Love what you’ve done with it.”

She narrowed her eyes in a stare I hadn’t seen for two years. “Bite me, Parker.” Then she pointed at my rucksack. “You bring the usual suspects?”

I nodded.

“Good. I got a couple things to attend to.”

Thirty seconds later we stood together in the center of the room.

Clack-clack.

Behind my back, the room’s doorknob rattled.

Fifty-one

As Polian stood at the interview-room door, his relief that it remained locked turned to annoyance. He grunted as he tried again to force the mechanical metal key into the mechanism.

The interrogator trotted up, the missing door guard in tow, and asked Polian, “Jammed?”

“Hasn’t been.” Polian turned to the door guard. “You had any trouble with this lock?”

“None, Major.” The man shook his head, then jerked it back up the corridor. “Sir, we got a problem. Just before the lights went out, two truckloads of ferrents pulled up to the front door. Two full rifle squads. They say they got a warrant to take the prisoner. The others have been holding ’em off ’til they could come and get you. Then the power went.”

Polian nodded. “Alright.” He had expected the ferrents sooner or later. Not in force, but in some fashion. He raised his palm. “I’ll go argue with them in a moment.”

“You might not want to, sir. The ferrents are real jumpy. When the lights went out, it almost started a firefight. Our guys are jumpy, too.” The broad-shouldered guard pointed at the door. “You want me to break it down, Major?”

Polian glanced up the corridor. Two nurses, arms full of linens, paused there, watching casually. They probably, and correctly, blamed the power outage on their visitors. Polian had no desire to advertise the Yavi presence further by breaking down doors.

He shook his head at the guard. “As long as the woman’s still unconscious in here, we can take the time to work on the lock.” He pointed at the observation closet’s door. “I’ll check.”

Fifty-two

Kit and I stared at the wiggling door knob as we crouched alongside the metal chair that had held her. The conversation beyond the door stopped.

Kit whispered, “They can’t get the door open.”

I whispered back, “I think I broke the pick off in the keyhole.”

She rolled her eyes at me. “Better lucky than competent.”

“Thanks.”

One set of footsteps sounded in the hall, and Kit gripped my arm.

“What’s wrong? They can’t see us in here,” I said.

She pointed at the dark window in the side wall. “One-way glass. I always hear them going around to the room next door to watch me. They’ll be able to see us in a minute.”

She reached across me and drew one of my machine pistols from its holster. A shoot-out with the half-dozen Yavi commandos who would soon burst through the door to this sealed room was a terrible option. Especially because the shots would probably spook twenty-plus ferrents, who would rush the place. I closed my hand over hers and the pistol. “No.”

She stared at me. “Parker, I’ll go down blazing before I’ll go back in that chair.”

“Me, too. But we may not have to.”

“We can’t just disappear.”

Fifty-three

Polian opened the door to the observation closet, flicked on the dim light, then stepped to the window, turned, and peered into the interview room.

He gasped. Then he stepped forward and pressed his palms and nose against the glass. “What the hell?” He pounded the thick glass with a fist, and his voice rose to a shout. “What the hell?”

In the room’s far corner stood the woman’s cot. Off center was the table upon which the interrogator’s control console and the hologen rested. Polian’s jacket still hung half-off the chair back where he had left it. Wires snaked from the console on the table to the bolted-down chair. Nothing had changed. Except the chair was…empty. The tape that had bound the woman dangled in slashed strips from the chair’s arms and legs.

Not only was the chair empty: the room was empty.

The interrogator and the guard rushed into the observation closet where Polian stood, eyes wide, pointing at the empty chair.

“Damn. She’s disappeared,” said the interrogator as he stared into the room, jaw slack.

Polian shook his head, slowly. “It’s impossible.”

The interrogator said, “Trueborn case officers really are freegging magicians.”

The guard said, “Maybe the ferrents got in here and took her.”

Polian paused. She was no magician. And this wasn’t the ferrents’ work.

Fifty-four

Kit and I stood, guns drawn and pointed up at the ceiling, backs pressed flat against the observation window wall, to its right. Two more pairs of feet had just run into the room that lay on the opposite side of the glass. From there, they couldn’t see us and the room would appear to be empty.

My heart thumped. All that this child’s trick would buy us was perhaps thirty seconds. Then common sense would overtake the Yavi’s surprise at the apparently empty locked room.

But people who have never experienced close-quarters battle don’t realize how often the difference between life and death turns on who plays peek-a-boo better.

I pointed the remote that I held at the door bore shaped-thermite breaching cone that I had stuck over the door lock, then turned to Kit one last time. She nodded. I thumbed the remote’s trigger.

Pop.

The charge fired a pencil of four thousand degree Fahrenheit flame into the lock’s guts, which dislodged the lock cylinder, then popped it out the opposite side of the door. The lock’s seared guts clunked onto the corridor floor beyond, and the heavy steel door swung out on its hinges without a squeak. Say that for Trueborns. Nobody in the universe was better at breaking stuff.

Kit and I dashed for the door, side by side, before the smoke even cleared.

We popped out into the corridor and turned back to back, sighting down our gun barrels.

The place was empty.

I shoved the observation room’s door shut until its latch clicked, put my shoulder to the guard’s desk until it squealed, and jammed it against the observation-room door.

Kit looked up and down the corridor as I stood and turned. “Which way?”

I grabbed her hand and tugged her in the direction of the stairwell that led to the door through which I had entered.

Behind us, muffled shouts and banging leaked from the blocked observation-room door. Ahead loomed the corridor junction where, to our right, lurked maybe five Yavi and two ferrent rifle squads. Across the junction, nurses and hospital orderlies drifted out into the corridor, curious about the commotion.

A nurse saw us running toward her, guns drawn. She screamed, dropped the tray she was carrying, and disappeared into a side door.

I looked back. Already, the feeble desk that blocked the door shuddered. The Yavis my cheap trick had trapped wouldn’t be trapped long.